Sports Talk.

Players Deserve Same Freedom As Coaches

July 16, 2000|By Andrew Bagnato. Andrew Bagnato is the Tribune's national college sports writer.

When Matt Doherty ditched Notre Dame last week with four years left on a five-year contract, Fighting Irish fans performed a passable imitation of Touchdown Jesus. Arms thrust heavenward, they wailed, "Doesn't a contract mean anything?"

Northwestern football fans knew the answer to that one, having watched as Gary Barnett, the best sub-.500 coach who ever came down the pike, bolted Evanston with most of a lucrative long-term contract remaining.

And, technically speaking, Doherty had not violated his deal, which reportedly included a clause allowing him to return to his alma mater.

As for Doherty's successor, Mike Brey, didn't he recently sign a seven-year extension at Delaware? He must have served at least seven days of that deal.

And what about Lon Kruger? Anyone remember how many years were left on his Illinois contract when he accepted $10 million to be the coach to be fired by the Atlanta Hawks?

College sports are supposed to provide life lessons. Basketball players at Notre Dame, Delaware and Illinois, to name only a few schools, learned a valuable one this summer: There is only one contract that means anything in big-time college sports.

It is the one that binds--and there was never a more apt term--the student-athlete to his or her institution.

Under the NCAA's rules, a player who decides to transfer from one Division I school to another has to sit out one season. The notion behind the rule is that it prevents players from disrupting their studies (no snickering, please) by discouraging easy movement between schools.

It's one thing for a coach under contract to take off. But if players were free to do the same thing, chaos would reign. That's probably true. But what has been more chaotic than the days since Bill Guthridge stepped down at North Carolina?

Guthridge's decision set off a chain of events that underscored how ludicrously out of touch big-time college athletics is with the rest of the world.

For a week after Guthridge quit, Roy Williams wrestled with the decision to stay at Kansas or return to his alma mater. I don't speak for anyone else, but my heart went out to the guy.

He had to choose between being a rich man at one basketball factory or a rich man at another basketball factory. No wonder Williams called it the toughest week of his life. Finally he decided he had found heaven in Lawrence, where they will shortly erect a statue in his honor, pending Kansas' return to the Final Four after this current drought of seven springs.

Williams said he had spent sleepless nights trying to decide what to do. He wasn't the only one lying awake this summer. So were the players he recruited. So were the players at Notre Dame, wondering whether the purported savior of that program would leave (he did). So were the players at Illinois, wondering whether new coach Bill Self would honor Kruger's recruiting promises (he might).

The fallout of this summer's coaching shuffle ought to catch the attention of the good folks down at NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis--and yes, there are many good folks there, folks who are committed to the charming if antiquated notion of amateur athletics.

In recent months, the phrase "redefining amateurism" has been heard around the halls of the year-old administration building in downtown Indy. That's bureaucracy-speak for "treat the kids like human beings."

Here's an easy (and inexpensive) way to improve the athletes' lot: Give them a measure of the freedom enjoyed by their masters, er, coaches.

When a coach leaves a school with time left on his contract--through firing, death, injury or just plain wanderlust--any player he signed is free to leave too. The NCAA would waive the rule requiring players to sit out a year when they transfer from one Division I school to another.

There would be two exceptions:

- A player who is more than halfway to his degree is ineligible. That would stop a coach from taking his entire starting lineup with him to his new school (unless they were all freshmen).

- A player can use this transfer only once. That would eliminate the possibility of a coach assembling a traveling team that would follow him from campus to campus each year.

There are loopholes, but the NCAA can figure out ways to plug them. Some coaches might try to extort more money by threatening to take talented underclassmen with them to a rival school. Not that any coach I've met would ever dream of something so low.

Many in college athletics will doubtless see this as a radical proposal. It's not.

You want radical? How about requiring Matt Doherty to reimburse Notre Dame for the years left on his contract? That would be radical.